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have many extracurricular opportunities, so sometimes I’ve envied people who feel incredibly adept in one area because they grew up doing it their whole lives. That being said, my life experience plays a part in everything I do, and I wouldn’t have traded it.
    One of the hardest things I’ve been through is watching my parents get sick, but it was when they were close to death that God moved in the most powerful way I’ve seen. My mom’s been near death multiple times, one time notably when doctors thought she had MS, and again with a serious staph infection that prompted one doctor who lacked appropriate bedside manner to tell her to write her tombstone. Some of you may know she was healed while preaching in Toronto after being almost too weak to make it to the stage.
    After going to Congo, Dad had post-traumatic stress syndrome coupled with malaria and mini-strokes that fired in his brain. Like almost any person who has grown up in ministry, I’m not one to over-spiritualize anything, but honestly it felt like a demonic principality was at work. He lost his memory for at least three months, grew lethargic and was pumped full of medication after being told his brain had shrunken and his organs were shutting down. After being prayed for daily by people around the world, being taken off his meds, and being pumped full of nutrients in Germany, he experienced radical transformation in his body, mind, and spirit. He came back a healthy man with restored memory and a vibrant personality, and is now flying our new ten-seat, turboprop plane, a miracle plane that has been his dream to fly. Hearing that I should prepare myself not to have my parents around is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve had to hear, and their recoveries are the most radical miracles I’ve ever witnessed. I know they couldn’t do what they do without the prayer that covers them from around the world.
My Spiritual Journey and Identity
    Like a lot of Christians I know who had Christian parents, I don’t remember a precise moment I got saved. I remember my mom reading children’s Bible storybooks to me in London and praying with me, but I couldn’t say exactly when it happened. Over the years I’ve experienced some radical moves of the Holy Spirit, and also some quirky mixes of human “stuff”—be it pain, insecurity, or pride woven in there—but to me that’s not the main point. What I find remarkable is even early on before I had experienced renewal myself or had much context for it, I never questioned whether it was God. I had a genuine love for the Lord early on, and I loved to sing and worship from the time I was little. In early high school I was involved in a dance ministry group with a number of Brazilian friends at a local Brazilian church, and we would minister at other churches as well. It was a meaningful experience to grow in the Lord with young peers and be accountable to friends in a really communal setting.
    I watched the videos my parents brought back from Toronto with another one of my best friends, also a Brazilian, named Ruama. We were immediately impacted by what we saw. When we talked about it at school, I learned that not everyone shared our opinions that the type of emotional intensity you see in renewal could be from God. Those of us from Iris were quietly known as the strange ones. Later on I lost a couple friendships over it, but I also saw good friends from school who had never experienced the Holy Spirit in a powerful way fully encounter Him.
    When I finally went to Toronto I had really high expectations, and I was lying on a floor one night realizing that I felt nothing at all. I wasn’t laughing or crying uncontrollably. I wasn’t hearing anything. I got up fully depressed and thought, “Wow, maybe God isn’t real.” A crazy thought, given our family history, but it was how I felt at the moment. The next morning I went to the conference anyway, and hypocritically enough even started praying for people